This is my first Ludum Dare and it’s coming up on about 24 hours since Ludum Dare 30 started. I’m going to take a quite break from developing and recap my progress over the last 24 hours.

I spent awhile thinking about different ideas based on the theme connected worlds. I spent about 15 minutes thinking of different ideas until I came up with one that stuck. I then spent the next hour thinking about the details, considering changing my idea because it wouldn’t work in the time constraint, and then finally focusing it down to something I think would be achievable within the time limit. I then spend most of the next 6 hours getting systems in place and flushing out the story, as well as making a few changes the the idea I had. I then got some sleep because I don’t want to burn myself out, especially on my first LD.

The second day I woke up and started again with some level design and implementing more systems. I’ve been doing that for about 7-8 hours and the both the levels and systems are pretty close to  an acceptable state for me.

The next 24 hours for me is content, that’s textures, some models that are left, sound and dialogue. I still have some programming and content that I haven’t started for the end game but I’ll think about those after I get the core game down. I think I will be able  to finish the game in the next 24 hours so I’ll work pretty hard today and hopefully tomorrow will be finishing touches and then bug fixing and polish, but I might not get around to it. Worst comes to worse I won’t have it done in time for the compo, but even if that happens I’ll just spend a little bit longer on it and submit it for the jam.

Unfortunately I don’t have much to show at the moment but after tomorrow I hope some of you can check my game out and I’ll write a post-mortem of my first LD when I have recovered.

P.S. I haven’t posted about this LD yet so just in case anyone is wondering I am using Unity, Maya, Photoshop, SFXR, and Audacity for making my game.

Let me first say I’m in! I didn’t get the chance earlier because I wasn’t sure if I was actually in, but the theme is pretty interesting and I have enough time this weekend.

I wanted my game to be slightly simpler as I wanted to get enough sleep this time (my last LD was a bit ambitious and even though I was able to finish it I didn’t get much sleep).

I came up with a few different ideas but I chose the simplest design that still seemed like it could be fun. I came up with a order filling mini-game. The more I develop the game the more I worry that I wont have time to add all the features that would make it fun, but I’m going to keep going at it and see how much I can get done. It doesn’t look like too much right now but I’m trying to get most of the major functionality before I make any final art assets. I’ve run into a few time consuming challenges but I’ve managed to figure them out or come up with alternatives.

I managed to finish Packaged (The title of my game) over an hour before the end of the compo this time around. Last LD I was scrambling at the end to fix bugs and make sure people could actually finish the game.

This time around things went pretty smoothly. Packaged is a pretty simple game and I didn’t run into much trouble, there were more art assets than I initially though so that took up time I wasn’t expecting. The game isn’t without bugs, but they have been pretty rare for me so hopefully it works fine for everyone else!

Well hopefully that is everything packed up correctly! Until next LD that is.

You can check out my entry HERE.